Posts Tagged ‘palestine’

Palestine by Joe Sacco is not a novel I’d look for myself. Which is quite a shame actually. Fortunately I have great friends who give me interesting books like this one.

Palestine is a comics which makes this rather thick book a fun and quick read. The plot takes place in 1991 and 1992 when Sacco traveled around Palestine and met and interviewed many people there. I had been’t really familiar with many of the facts about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but I had been kind of on the Israeli side. Why? That’s a good question. I think it’s because of the media that present Palestinians as terrorists and Israel Jews as victims. Well, this book might be biased the other way, but at least helped me open my eyes a bit.

What it shows is people whose country has been taken over in 1948 by someone who may have lived there in the past (a long time ago), but never actually had had a regular state there. So basically you live in your village peacefully and then some soldiers come and chase you out. To make sure you won’t come back, they burn your house down. Then you live in a refugee camp for almost 60 years and your kids and grandkids have never seen anything else apart from it. You can’t leave your house at night because of the curfew.

And if you haven’t been in prison, you certainly know someone close to you who has. You know many people that have been shot or hurt by the Israeli army. Eeach small protest is punished big time. Did your kid throw a stone on a soldier? Might have been your kid, actually. We’ll saw off branches from the olive trees your income depends on (and that take at least 5 years to grow up again). Often people are tortured to confess even if they are innocent.

It reminds me what I heard about communism a lot. Now imagine you’re 15, you live in a refugee camp, and all the above is part of your everyday life. What would you do?

Hi there! I’m Jan Kubr, mainly a Ruby/Ruby on Rails developer from Prague. See my professional summary or my LinkedIn profile. I write about Ruby and RoR at jan on ruby and here about everything else. If you want to know more, feel free to contact me via Flempo. Cheers.